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Topic 5 – Reflective Summary & Comments

Many of us are definitely supports Open Access for free access to materials online. Even if the document requires a payment, students like me will definitely search for a free, downloadable document online.

However, after reading WeiJie’s post, it makes me feel that a paid document is being spread online as a free document will cause the company to lose money. Furthermore with many books going digitized to become e-book, companies might change to producing e-book instead. We should often stand in the company’s standpoint to understand what they are facing.

In KaiYuan’s post, he mentioned about the amount of citations that Open access have benefitted them. Over the years, there have been an increased in documents being open access. With documents being open accessed, it helps to let authors gain recognitions.

As more books are going digitized, we might think that it will be easy to search online. Yes, even though it is easy to find it. But book that are provided online may only be free for the first few pages. So we definitely need to pay for the remaining chapters or whole book to find what we want. This actually tells us about how companies are changing their methods of letting their articles reach people. As technology continues to improve, instead of printing the articles and documents, they are uploading their articles online to reach out to people of different countries.

In my standpoint, I felt that materials should be freely accessed by everyone as it helps to benefit students that are doing research, further reading and references. On top of that, since it is freely accessed by everyone, scientists will be able to benefit as they might be able to make a new breakthrough with the information that they are able to get accessed to. Even if we are able to get accessed to information, citations and references will be required as it will help them get recognitions along the way.

In conclusion, there are definitely documents that needs to be open and closed access. It will be good if a useful and enriching document is free so that people will be able to benefit from it. However, whether the material become open or closed access will require the author to decide. With the constant improving technology, it is hard to keep document closed access as there will always be someone to share it around.